Questions About Bluetooth Peripherals

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Questions About Bluetooth Peripherals

On what devides will those adapters work?

luckychucky

7:38 pm on Oct 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

I'm a little confused about using peripherals with Bluetooth. I've seen those little Bluetooth adapters you plug into the USB port on your computer. Let's say I have a laptop that's already Bluetooth-enabled, and I want it to send printing data via Bluetooth to a non-bluetooth-enabled printer.

Do I plug one of thsoe adapter's into the printer's USB port and everything will run like a top, just as if it were hardwired by cable? Or will Bluetooth only work between original Bluetooth-enabled peripherals, so no adapter will bridge the divide?

I can't find a shred of info online. Everything seems to be about Bluetooth apdapters on the computer end. What about the Bluetooth adapters on the peripherals? Somebody please clue me in.
Thanks

kaled

1:04 am on Oct 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

I can't given you anything definitive, but I recently bought a printer that claims to be blue-tooth enabled but only if you buy their blue-tooth adapter and plug it into a second (dedicated/flat) USB port. This suggests to me that the periferal device has to be designed to accept a USB bluetooth adapter.

If you have an 802.11 adapter, you can use a wireless network hub with an integrated USB printer port - I think Linksys do one. Probably something similar exists for blue-tooth but I haven't noticed.

Kaled.

jtara

6:32 am on Oct 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

You would need either a Bluetooth-enabled printer, or else a bluetooth dongle specifically designed to attach to a printer.

The dongles designed to work with a PC are not going to help with a printer. These dongles require a driver on the PC that knows how to talk to the dongle - that specific brand of dongle, to boot. A printer that wasn't designed to work with Bluetooth obviously isn't going to have the required driver. Further, there's that master/slave USB thing. A PC is a master. A printer is a slave. A bluetooth PC adapter is a slave. A slave can't talk to a slave...

It would be possible to build a Bluetooth dongle to plug into a printer and bluetooth-enable it. Dunno if any exist. It would have to implement one or more of the Bluetooth printing profiles, know how to talk to a wide variety of printers, and act as a master to the printer. I kinda doubt it.

That said, I wouldn't bother with using Bluetooth for printing. Why not go Wi-Fi? The speed just isn't there with Bluetooth.

FWIW, I did Bluetooth development for about a year. If you have a Windows PC with Bluetooth, you probably have my code in your PC, for better or worse...

luckychucky

4:08 pm on Oct 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

Why not go Wi-Fi?

Do elaborate, pretty please?

jtara

4:29 pm on Oct 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

Well, I did a search, and there ARE Bluetooth printer adapters.

I'd imagine that in most cases, the Bluetooth adapters use serial port profile, and just pass-through the printer control characters. Most of them are generic adapters, though there are some that are printer-specific.

But there are wifi printer adapters as well. So, why not just go with wifi? Much faster. If you are printing heavy bit-mapped graphics in color, for example, Bluetooth is going to be a limitation. And the wifi adapters are much cheaper as well.

Just do a search for the term, "bluetooth printer adapter" or "wifi printer adapter" and you will find a bunch.

luckychucky

4:47 pm on Oct 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

Thanks. I just did that search for WiFi adapters. I'm still a little unclear about universality vs. specificity...I guess the only thing to do is buy a WiFi adapter, plug it in and hope it works? I'm going to be running a Zebra label printer.